Classified Canada: when it comes to the nation's intelligence and security history, much of our past is considered a state secret--and that's a shame.

"Turn on your television!" Wesley Wark learned of the World Trade Centre attacks from a public-relations officer at the University of Toronto. That morning the university was being flooded with media requests for expert analysts, and Wark, who is a historian of security and intelligence studies, was in hot demand.

For several months after September 11, 2001, Wark found media interviews occupied him "seven days a week." Demand has slowed a little since then. Still, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and our constant twenty-first-century concern with terrorism mean there is public interest in secret intelligence and counter-terrorism. I thought it was time to look into Canada's history of security and intelligence and what we actually get from it.

"Is there a particularly Canadian history of secret intelligence?" I asked Wark. He assured me we have one of the longest among modern nations.

During the American Civil War, pre-Confederation Canadian governments took steps to ensure that neither Union nor Confederate agents could provoke a breach of Canadian neutrality. A little later, a combination of Canadian espionage and Fenian ineptitude meant "Fenian planning was very nearly an open book for the Canadian security forces."

In the Second World War, Canada did significant work in signals intelligence, tracking German, Japanese and Vichy French communications through the shadowy "Examination Unit." One of the leading figures in that story was Lester Pearson--a future prime minister--who had become External Affairs' man on intelligence and security matters.

Canada later used its wartime contributions to lobby for a place at the table alongside its intelligence allies.

"Really," Wark says, "it was a case of Canadian chutzpah--of Canadians in the post-war era bargaining the country into the most secret club in the world."